Office Depot review: This is regarding our return policy (i'm an od employee) 43

As an employee of Office Depot (I'm only 19 so you can hear me out or not it's up to you), I frequent these sites because I'm curious to see what bothers our customers the most. I'm not doing this to protect the company name, I'm simply doing this because as a cashier I see many loyal customers at our store and I don't want people who live near OUR store to get a bad vibe from these complaints.

I respect everybody's opinion and believe every story on here. I'm writing this because I see our return policy is really frustrating people (not just on here but in our store too). Let me first clarify that our return policy is NO different then any other stores' policy as far as opened products, receipt handling, defective products etc. If you purchase a $500 laptop from us and you take it home, you can return it and get you're money back.

However, if you open the product (which is what we'd all do) and theres something wrong with it, you can no longer get cash back on it. You can bring it back in exchange for the same laptop (the one you got is defective so we'll give you another one). The reason being is we can absolutely not re-sell an open box laptop. Once that security tape is cut off the top of the box we are required by law to send the device back to the manufacture. If we gave customers money back for every laptop we needed to send back, we would lose millions of dollars.

Remember we bought you're laptop before you. We do get a fraction of the value of the device back from the manuf. but maybe $30 out of the $370(est.) we paid to sell it. The open container rule applies to all of our technology items. As for ink cartridges, the rules are flexed based on each store manager from each store. I know my store manager Mike Baxter is more then happy to take back an unopen or even defective opened cartridge. Even if you don't have a receipt, he'll give you store credit as long as you're not trying to scam us.

In conclusion, I just want to let everybody on here understand that it is easy to judge an entire company based on a bad experience at one of their locations (I've done it too) but it's not right. We at Riverside, CA Store 968 go to great lengths to satisfy our customers and we have a loyal customer base. I'm just tired of feeling like a bad guy and feeling like a bad store because I work for a company that may have a couple unhelpful associates.

Thanks,

- Donnie Stafford
(Customer Service Specialist, Store 968, Riv, CA)